


The Superhero Viewed from a Distance

by FlyingPigPoet



Series: There Oughta Be a Superhero Handbook [3]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Slow Burn, buildup to SuperCorp
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-15 19:58:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11238108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyingPigPoet/pseuds/FlyingPigPoet
Summary: Season One, Episodes 3 and 4 from Lena Luthor's point of view, watching back in Metropolis.





	1. Fight or Flight: Live

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Lena was a scientist and a businesswoman, not a soldier, but even she had taken some karate, kung fu, and fencing. She knew about the value of economy of motion and economy of force to get the job done. And Supergirl did not have them. Her critics called her sloppy. Lena thought she was simply young, new, untrained.
> 
> And that was interesting. It suggested that the Girl of Steel, like her cousin, hadn't planned on using her powers, outing herself, becoming a hero. The fact that her first save had happened with her dressed in street clothes supported that hypothesis. That seemed to Lena to bode well. "

The meeting with the newly constituted board of LuthorCorp went on just short of forever, which was shorter than they used to go on for, and better yet, this time they actually got things done. They had even approved the name change. When Lena got back to her office, Jess brought her a pot of green tea, an Advil, and CatCo Magazine.

"Thank you," said Lena, washing the pill down with the tea. "But seriously, Jess, this really isn't my reading style. Oh-- Her again. And an interview?"

"It's short, but the opinion piece by Cat Grant is... worth reading."

"Opinions by the Queen of All Media about her most recent trademark application... seems like a conflict of interest there."

"She's surprisingly balanced. The pictures aren't particularly high-res, but the side interviews with National City power players are also worth a look. She even got some from other cities, including our own Perry White and some police bigwig from Gotham."

Jess left. Lena looked at her watch: four o'clock. God, she needed a break. So she slipped off her heels and settled in on her couch with her tea and read the interviews and the op-ed piece and the letters, which were unsurprisingly pro and con about alien vigilante justice. When she finished she found herself thoughtful and tired, definitely too worn out from the board meeting to stay late working as she normally did. She had Jess call her driver.

As he smoothly navigated Metropolis's dark streets, she mused over the lights of the skyscrapers and the neon signs they were leaving behind downtown.

"So, Tom," said Lena. "Have you heard about the new superhero making the news in National City?"

"Supergirl? Yes, ma'am, I have. My little girl, she's six, is so excited. She's been drawing pictures of her saving airplanes--" He stopped short and his eyes flickered at her in the rearview mirror.

"Don't worry, Tom. Just because she's his cousin doesn't mean we have anything to fear from her."

"But National City, ma'am. You don't think that's just a coincidence do you? Her showing up there right before you move the company there?"

She smiled. "Coincidences do happen. And if it's by design, well, I am very good at dealing with design flaws. Too many years in the lab not to be. But who knows? Maybe it's fate."

And Tom didn't look comforted, but Lena didn't think this Super was going to give her trouble. She had Cat Grant's grudging respect. Until Lena heard differently or interacted with the Kryptonian herself, that was good enough for her.

//

Lena woke the next morning to TV reporters talking about Supergirl's rescue of the trapped driver of an overturned bus, and how that "party was crashed by an Ironman-style villain" with a power core and apparently radioactive attacks. Lena scoffed. She was sure neither the driver nor Supergirl would have called the accident a party. Stupid reporters.

The following fight, which civilians caught in pieces on their phones, sugg3ested that Supergirl was strong and resilient, at least as much so as Superman. But her fighting skills were not so good. Lena was a scientist and a businesswoman, not a soldier, but even she had taken some karate, kung fu, and fencing. She knew about the value of economy of motion and economy of force to get the job done. And Supergirl did not have them. Her critics called her sloppy. Lena thought she was simply young, new, untrained.

And that was interesting. It suggested that the Girl of Steel, like her cousin, hadn't planned on using her powers, outing herself, becoming a hero. The fact that her first save had happened with her dressed in street clothes supported that hypothesis. That seemed to Lena to bode well. Villains and businessmen laid out plans ahead of time, created logos and exit strategies. Heroes saw a problem and leaped in unprepared when it seemed that no one else could or would. Was it sloppy? Well, yes, a bit. But Lena would rather take a well-intentioned sloppiness to a well-planned nefariousness any day.

//

As the week rolled on, Lena toured R&D, shutting down some of Lex's old programs and turning around and giving the same employees funding for new projects--less paramilitary and much more environmentally applicable. She talked with great passion about sustainability and resilience, very different from the alien menace language Lex had always used. A few employees grumbled (and yes, she made sure to note their names) but many looked almost relieved. It was a start. PR, Legal, and Marketing were each their own separate headaches. She plowed through each new fresh hell with Jess behind her, taking notes, or sometimes ahead of her making plans.

And at least once or twice a day she checked in on the news: how was LuthorCorp doing compared to other tech companies? Well, much better after the news that Maxwell Lord of LordTech had been kidnapped from his labs by the very same villain, Reactron, who had recently fought Supergirl.

Reactron. She remembered him. He had some kind of thing against Superman, but no one had ever learned why. The fact that Supergirl and Superman had apparently gone against him together, but that Maxwell Lord only thanked the Man of Steel Lena thought highly suspect. She knew that Lord was a huge sexist prick, but it still. It was odd.

The rescue brought an uptick to LordTech's stock, but Lena was amused that commenters were actually comparing "the new LuthorCorp" favorably to LordTech, since Lena's company seemed to have "given up its combative business plan that used to have crazies coming out of the woodwork." 

Well, that was good, but still: stupid reporters.

That evening Lena attended a tech conference in Opal City, and Lena had given a version of her technology for sustainability speech and then gone out for drinks afterwards with some of the country's top environmental engineers. She drank club soda the whole night, taking people's business cards and promising a few that she would be in touch. Not all of her best talent from Metropolis had chosen to make the move to National City. She needed to recruit.

When she arrived at her hotel around midnight, she turned on the news to hear about Cat Grant's gala opening for the most recent CatCo Magazine. The footage of the fight between Supergirl and Reactron inside the museum made her gasp. The footage of the waitresses wearing skimpy Supergirl costumes and handing out hors d'ouevres made her snort. The still shots of the nuclear scientist who had been Reactron before Supergirl pulled out his energy core and encased it in lead made Lena... sad.

She remembered Lex at the end, still screaming about vengeance, foaming at the mouth, but broken, defeated. Still alive, unlike this poor, misguided soul. But still defeated. 

Lena poured two fingers of scotch. She raised her glass once to the television, murmured, "Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon him and give him peace." They were words from her childhood, still remembered.

Then she raised her glass to the TV again, to the blur of red and blue on the screen. "Atta girl, whoever you are."

//

The days passed. Thanksgiving was almost upon them. Lena didn't really celebrate most holidays. On Thanksgiving day she would open a slightly more expensive bottle of wine to drink with whatever dinner she would eat at her desk. Jess always ordered for her in advance, knowing it was useless to try to get her boss to take the day off.

"What do you want me to do? Watch football and parades? I'd rather think about how to build a better solar voltaic battery."

And Jess had kept her up on the whole thing with that shock jock radio announcer who had gotten herself demoted to reporting traffic (apparently for saying pretty awful things about Supergirl; once again, Lena wondered about conflicts of interest), and then had gotten electrocuted just as Supergirl was rescuing her helicopter. Lena hadn't give the woman much thought. Then she heard how this Livewire had terrorized Cat Grant, burnt out the electrical for the whole CatCo building and had finally been taken in by--who else?--Supergirl.

It occurred to Lena that she had two options when it came to the Supers. With Superman, she had always stayed at a distance, at first because she had believed Lex and later out of embarrassment. But if she was going to move to National City, and move her entire company there, it might be wise to, at the least, not antagonize the Girl of Steel, and more likely, to make friends with her. Or allies. Or something. Because a friend or ally like that might be just the thing that would make a difference in whether or not her company failed or succeeded.

And it occurred to her to wonder just how different Supergirl was from her cousin. She had noted that in the end, Supergirl had taken out Reactron with science and guile rather than sheer brawn (although she had to have muscles and guts to fight him long enough and to get close to him to rip out the core). Who knows? she thought. Maybe this Super would be more Lena's style rather than Lex's. That could be... very positive.


	2. How Does She Do It? Let's Take Notes.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Early season one, from Jess the Secretary's point of view.
> 
> "Supergirl successfully stopped the train, leaving the high-speed front car with its bomb and its sad but defiant terrorist to speed off into a future of fire and evaporation. In the one photo they got of Supergirl, she seemed distressed. And that seemed to Jess to be the most valuable piece of data she had found for the hero yet.
> 
> Supergirl cared."

Jess Huang kept track of a lot of things these days. Back when they were at Harvard Business School, Jess had only had to keep track of her own things (groceries, crushes, assignments). Coming to work with Lena Luthor in the lab at LuthorCorp had meant taking on more and more of the things that Lena needed keeping tabs on (requisitions of equipment, calculations for experiments, new and exciting ways to keep the male engineers who worked with them off Lena's back, out of her hair, away from her results). After Lex, Jess became much more than a labrat's right hand. Suddenly she was the right hand of a labrat who was also on the board of her family's company. And after that, the right hand of the company's CEO. And by that time, Jess had become very, very good at it, and very, very loyal to Lena.

So, in addition to the company's day-to-day workings, the plans for the move, the revisions of the new mission statement that Lena was slaving over, and the prototyping of the last two of Lena's inventions that the whole CEO thing was getting in the way of, Jess also took on, without mentioning it to anyone, finding out more about the resident guardian of the city they were moving to: Supergirl.

Cat Grant's interview had quoted her as saying Superman was her cousin, so Kryptonian: flight, laser vision, freeze breath, strength, great hair. Cat had called her a millennial, but Jess was skeptical of youthful-looking aliens. But this woman seemed smaller than her cousin. Would that mean she was not as strong? Not as fast? Jess took it upon herself to find out more.

Conveniently, the dangers to National City recently were providing her data to work with. One Monday, news reported a bomb exploding in a building owned by Maxwell Lord's company. Supergirl had flown there within seconds (but since Jess didn't know where she'd started from, she couldn't calculate speed) and held up a corner of the building that was in danger of collapse, shoring up the steel beams with her vision and then blowing out the fire. Jess pulled out her calculator. That had to be somewhere in the realm of 120 pounds per square foot, multiplied by five floors. Wow.

And then later that day a bomb at LordTech had proven to be unstable and Supergirl had flown it to bay and then flown it high enough that when it exploded it didn't harm the city... although Supergirl had taken a dunking in the bay. Jess looked at the time of the surveillance camera outside LordTech and the time the news recorded the explosion. Jesus freaking Christ. That would have to be, what? Mach Two?

Her phone binged. Lena. 

TheRealLL: Jess, have you got the finalized offer for Bruce Wayne?

JessIsBest: On your desk, ready for signature. Also, counterproposals from R&D... just as you anticipated.

TheRealLL: Have you read them?

JessIsBest: Skimmed. Half Lex, half you. Budget is way too optimistic though...

TheRealLL: Good. Put them off with that. Anything else?

JessIsBest: Reporter from Planet wants quotes about SG in NC, particularly her connections with LordTech. Don't recognize the name.

TheRealLL: I'll see him tomorrow between meetings. Keep it short. Stupid reporters.

Jess went back to work: hounding Finance to update the quarterly results so Lena could review them before they had to be turned around and reported, rejecting the new logo ideas that Marketing had sent up. Like all good Personal Assistants, Jess could easily forge her boss's signature on things, though she used her powers for good simply to speed things along. By the end of the day, she had finished a very long to-do list.

She picked up pizza on her way back home, exhausted. Her little apartment wasn't perfect, but it was cozy. She sat on her cushy sofa eating pizza on paper towels and watched the news.

Big surprise: it was about National City and Supergirl.

The evening before, during the maiden voyage of the Supertrain, Max Lord's 500 km/hour high-speed rail masterpiece, two bombs had been reported: one at the airport and one on the train. Supergirl successfully stopped the train, leaving the high-speed front car with its bomb and its sad but defiant terrorist to speed off in a future of fire and evaporation. In the one photo they got of Supergirl, she seemed distressed. And that seemed to Jess to be the most valuable piece of data she had found for the hero yet.

Supergirl cared.


	3. Red Armor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Red Faced, from Lena Luthor's point of view.

Lena Luthor strutted through the lobby of LuthorCorp in her killer heels and the French ensemble that she privately referred to as the French Lieutenant because although she hated the way it wrapped her up tight in the cranberry pencil skirt and jacket with just a peak of black silk blouse showing, it felt a little bit like armor, and not being able to breathe freely was sometimes the price a woman had to pay for getting through the melee alive.

She already knew what the shareholders' meeting would bring, had already predicted it to Jess: she would present the numbers saying that the company was doing 38.82% better than it ever had under Lex, better than it had in all but her father's best three years, and they were going to protest. Maybe not what she had been doing, but what she was planning to do. She shouldn't move the company, she absolutely shouldn't change the name, and really, why was a mission statement change really needed after all? She wondered if the people living under Mount Vesuvius would have been comforted to have known the day before what was coming.

Probably not.

Luckily, modern data analytics allowed her to be a little more prepared than those old Romans had been. She had comparative projections showing the positive repercussions, which also predicted that those positives had a limited time window. If they didn't take advantage within the next fiscal year, the positives would disappear, maybe even turn into big negatives.

Shareholders, she reflected, were either very greedy or very risk averse. To be fair, she forced herself to admit that, after a company's long-effective CEO dies of cancer within only a few months of diagnosis, and his successor is arrested for conspiracy and mass murder less than a year later, the shareholders might have some reason for becoming slightly... risk averse.

The rational side of her, the side that she had learned from her cold adoptive mother, forced her to accept these things while keeping a haughty demeanor appropriate to the Luthor name, keeping her cool while the shareholders and more than one Vice President of something or other lost theirs. In the pause after they almost came to blows, she calmly jotted down the VPs' names. 

Then as the silence continued, she looked up and gave them a genuine smile. "I am very glad that we have been able to have this constructive discussion. I already have some new ideas of how to soften the blow for divisions facing changes, while at the same time making the most of these exciting opportunities. Even now we have some high-tech projects that--"

She caught herself. That's what it would look like: like she had almost said something ill-advised about future project that would make them millions (people would insist on filling in unfinished sentences). But no, she was showing more self-discipline than Lex ever had, Lex with his promises of ending the alien menace etc., etc. They would remember thinking that.

She gave a self-deprecating little laugh. "This might not be the time to talk about projects still on the lab bench. But we'll be giving you a copy of the numbers we've just described, along with my further analysis of what those numbers really mean in the quarterly report as you leave. As always, speaking as a Luthor, it is a pleasure doing business with you, our business partners."

She had heard her father say that last line, just once, after he had grudgingly accepted the need to take the company public (with Luthors having the resounding majority). Lena had seen the shareholders preen when he said it and she had made it one of her standby lines when she needed to whip them into shape. Depressingly, fortunately, it almost always worked. Stupid sheep.

She stayed behind as people left, making time to answer questions (23% about the company, 70% asking after Lex and Lena's health, 7% meaningless drivel meant to make the questioner feel important for talking to the CEO). And Lena smiled and smiled.

Her feet hurt, she could barely breathe, her IQ was probably greater than any ten people in the room combined, and she remembered Lillian's words. "These things are sent to test us, Lena. If you are a real Luthor, you will pass with flying colors, make your father and myself proud. When in doubt, smile with your mouth. Keep your eyes a little cold and keep them wondering, guessing."

So Lena smiled until the last shareholder and the last company officer, all but herself and Jess, had left the room and gone to wherever they were going, to cheerful dings of the elevators.

Jess left, got herself a drink at the water fountain, and came back. "All's clear."

Lena nodded and sank into her chair, unbuttoning her jacket and pushing her shoes to the carpet. She and Jess watched the color return to Lena's pale toes.

Jess asked, hesitantly, "Why do you do... all of... this?"

"Because if I don't, who will? Lillian? Hardly."

"You are a little like her, ma'am. No offence."

"None taken. I am bringing back my father's influence to this company, via my own ideas about tech and the world. If I am using my mother's training and role modeling, what of it? It gets the job done."

"Do you..." Jess stopped short, looking uncertain.

"Do I use anything I got from Lex? Yes, hope, sadness, the powerful intent to never let the power go to my head like he did. They are, I admit, must less easy to recognize from a marketing standpoint." She smiled to take the sting out. Surely, by now, Jess knew she could ask anything of Lena.

Maybe she did. She asked, "So why do you always stay to the bitter end? They never used to."

"Two reasons. People expect more nurturing behavior from a woman, and by listening to the concerns they're willing to tell me I hear something about the concerns they're not, which can be useful information. Also, a bad day keeps going bad. If I walk out of here after a bad meeting, I guarantee you that the elevator will not come to me, and nothing says puny mortal like the elevator refusing to come."

Companionably, they walked out to the elevator. Lena said, "Watch." She hit the up button, showed Jess the time on her phone. Two minutes later, the elevator appeared. With a grimace, Lena said, "QED."

//

The next morning, Lena woke up with a headache, pissed off at the world that had made her first an orphan, then a Luthor, then a wildly successful engineer at her family's company, and then its wildly unpopular CEO.

It was unfair, the lot of it. The rage she could barely contain came out in burnt waffles, extra traffic that even Tom couldn't get around, meetings with unprepared employees, with late peers from the city trying power plays, with a very tired Jess working at only 98%. She could forgive Jess, and did, always, but the rest of them just made her very angry. She threw a pen across the room and it broke, spilling blue ink on the pale grey carpet. She bit off a curse, took a cloth napkin and the water ewer and tried to mop it up, but only made things worse so that she had to call Jess in. Jess called Maintenance and pushed Lena into the executive bathroom and forced her to scrub until none of the blue on her hands would tarnish her white linen dress, one that Jess knew Lena quite liked. Thank God for Jess.

While the Maintenance men did their best with the stain, Lena turned on the news. Apparently, Supergirl was also having anger issues. The reporters talked about how she had responded to a road rage incident, saving an elementary school soccer team, only to then respond with rage herself when the men got violent.

"If Superman had done that, they'd have applauded him," she muttered.

One of the men looked up and said, in surprise, "Yeah, but she's a girl."

Lena looked down at the middle-aged man on his hands and knees cleaning a stain on her carpet, a stain she had made herself out of anger. Teeth clenched, she nodded, thinking of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. "In heels and backwards," she muttered and went back to her desk. Quarterlies were over. Time for a new set a quarterlies. God, she missed working in the lab.

//

The meeting with Bruce Wayne went better than she had expected. He was polite, formal, ridiculously well dressed even for the circles she spent time in, although a little... foppish. It was an odd thought she had as she shook his hand and showed him to the door. Very nineteenth century. It wasn't that she thought he was gay; Lex had been pretty clear that that wasn't true, and she had never asked how he knew. Also, a lesbian herself, Lena knew a lot of gay men, and many of them were firemen, Marines, big burly bearded engineers. Bruce was something else. It was almost as if he were in a closet himself, but the opposite of any closet Lena had ever seen.

She put it out of her mind for the time being. The partnership for getting women and minorities into the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) would go forward, as would the project for highways paved with solar panels, although that would take years to see fruition.

So many years to get any of her best ideas off the runway and into the air. So frustrating.

And when she finally went home and watched the eleven o'clock news, she thought that Supergirl must be just as frustrated. The Army had unleashed some new devilish technology, an armed android that had gone rogue and attacked a general and some reporters. Supergirl had saved them (of course) but then it sent a tornado through National City, doing millions of dollars of damage, and the android had gotten away while Supergirl went to stop the cyclone and save her city.

Again.

And Lena, thinking of closets and outness, thought, And the poor girl has only been out for what? Six weeks? That was a lot to handle after only six weeks.

And then Lena thought, what did it mean that Supergirl came out more than ten years after Superman did? If he left Krypton as a baby, as Lex had said, when it was actually in the process of exploding, how could she be younger than him? So, maybe older. Maybe she came to Earth first to make a place for him? But why wouldn't they have come together? And if, as she was now showing, she was easily his equal, why not come out as a team?

Unless Krypton was as backwards about male/female power structures as Earth was. And maybe living on Earth long enough to see a better way had made her ready later than he had been?

On a whim, she texted Jess.

TheRealLL: New side project. No hurry. Still wondering about SG, differences with SM. Could we amass data on her? Them? Don't put this in front of other projects, but it might be useful to know a few things before we make the move.

After a few minutes, a text appeared:

JessIsBest: I can give you the folder tomorrow morning. Paper can't be hacked.

TheRealLL: Remind me to give you a raise. Or at least a better moving bonus.

JessIsBest: Won't say no.

And when two days later, Lena had finally had time to read through the file, including the addendum on the Red Tornado Affair and the rumors that after that fight, Supergirl had disappeared from National City, Lena had sat thinking for a long time, and then had gone down to the subbasement of LuthorCorp Metropolis, where a few things still were left from Lex's reign of error. Nothing major, nothing the cops saw any use in, especially given that Lex wrote different lab notebooks in different code. But she still knew where his personal notebooks were kept, between the company HQ and the family mansion. Maybe it was time Lena turned her caution and politeness to the wind and started to learn a whole lot more about Superman and his... family.


End file.
